I. INTRODUCTION
Cuneiform (Latin cuneus, “wedge”), term applied to a mode of writing utilizing wedge-shaped strokes, inscribed mainly on clay but also on stone, metals, wax, and other materials. This technique was used by the ancient people of Western Asia. The earliest texts in cuneiform script were made in about 3000 BC, having antedated the use of alphabets by some 1500 years. The latest cuneiform inscriptions date from the 1st century AD. Cuneiform writing, which originated in southern Mesopotamia, was invented probably by the Sumerians, who used it to inscribe the Sumerian language; it was subsequently adapted for writing the Akkadian language, of which Babylonian and Assyrian are dialects. Because Akkadian, the language of later inhabitants of Sumer, became the language of international communication it was studied in schools throughout the ancient Middle East, and the use of cuneiform spread to Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, and, for diplomatic correspondence, to Egypt.
II. EARLY METHODS OF INSCRIPTION
The earliest cuneiform inscriptions were composed of pictographs. It was far easier, however, to imprint straight lines in the soft clay with a special instrument than to draw in the irregular lines of the pictographs. Consequently a stylus, suited to making tapered impressions, was invented, and the outlines of the pictographs were gradually altered into patterns composed of wedge-shaped lines, which became so stylized that they bore little resemblance to the original pictograph characters.
Originally, each sign stood for a word. Because words that could not themselves be pictured were expressed by pictographs of related objects (for example, god by a star, to stand and to go by a foot), some signs stood for several different words. Because most Sumerian words are monosyllabic, the signs were soon used as mere syllables regardless of their original meaning. Signs that had more than one reading as word signs or logograms also acquired several syllabic values. This multitude of readings is known as polyphony. On the other hand, Sumerian has many words that sound alike (homonyms); syllabic values taken from such homonyms also coincide; they are known as homophones.
The fully developed cuneiform system had more than 600 signs. About half of these could be used as either logograms or syllables, the others as logograms only. Word signs also served as determinatives to indicate the class (such as man, tree, stone) to which a word belonged. The system remained a mixture of logograms and syllables throughout its existence. When it was applied to another language, the logograms were simply read in that language. Although at times a tendency existed to simplify the script by reducing the number of logograms and the use of polyphony, the step to an alphabet, in which each sign stands for one sound, was never made in standard cuneiform; only the Ugaritic and Old Persian scripts reached that stage.
The cuneiform script underwent considerable changes over a period of more than two millennia. The image below shows the development of the sign SAG “head.”
Stage 1 shows the pictogram as it was drawn around 3000 BC. Stage 2 shows the rotated pictogram as written around 2800 BC. Stage 3 shows the abstracted glyph in archaic monumental inscriptions, from ca. 2600 BC, and stage 4 is the sign as written in clay, contemporary to stage 3. Stage 5 represents the late 3rd millennium, and stage 6 represents Old Assyrian ductus of the early 2nd millennium, as adopted into Hittite. Stage 7 is the simplified sign as written by Assyrian scribes in the early 1st millennium, and until the script’s extinction.
1. Archaic cuneiform
In the mid-3rd millennium, writing direction was changed to left to right in horizontal rows (rotating all of the pictograms 90°Counter-clockwise in the process), and a new wedge-tipped stylus was used which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped (“cuneiform”) signs; these two developments made writing quicker and easier. By adjusting the relative position of the tablet to the stylus, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions.
Cuneiform tablets could be fired in kilns to provide a permanent record, or they could be recycled if permanence was not needed. Many of the tablets found by archaeologists were preserved because they were baked when attacking armies burned the building in which they were kept. The script was also widely used on commemorative stelae and carved reliefs to record the achievements of the ruler in whose honor the monument had been erected.
2. Akkadian cuneiform
The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by the Akkadians from ca. 2500 BC, and by 2000 BC, had evolved into Old Assyrian cuneiform, with many modifications to Sumerian orthography. The Semitic equivalents for many signs became distorted or abbreviated to form new “phonetic” values, but because the syllabic nature of the script as refined by the Sumerians was unintuitive to Semitic speech.
“Typical” signs have usually in the range of about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of twenty or more (although it is not always clear if a ligature should be considered a single sign or two collated but still distinct signs); the ligature KAxGUR7 consists of 31 strokes.
Later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary, together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs in the script were polyvalent, having both a syllabic and logographic meaning. The complexity of the system bears a resemblance to classical Japanese, written in a Chinese-derived script, where some of these Sinograms were used as logograms and others as phonetic characters.
3. Assyrian cuneiform
Neo-Assyrian ligature KAxGUR7 (𒅬); the KA sign (𒅗) was a Sumerian compound marker, and appears frequently in ligatures enclosing other signs. GUR7 is itself a ligature of SÍG.AḪ.ME.U, meaning “to pile up; grain-heap” (Akkadian kamāru; karû).
This “mixed” method of writing continued through the end of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, although there were periods when “purism” was in fashion and there was a more marked tendency to spell out the words laboriously, in preference to using signs with a phonetic complement. Yet even in those days, the Babylonian syllabary remained a mixture of ideographic and phonetic writing.
Hittite cuneiform is an adaptation of the Old Assyrian cuneiform of ca. 1800 BC to the Hittite language. When the cuneiform script was adapted to writing Hittite, a layer of Akkadian logographic spellings was added to the script, with the result that we no longer know the pronunciations of many Hittite words conventionally written by logograms.
In the Iron Age (ca. 10th to 6th c. BC), Assyrian cuneiform was further simplified. From the 6th century, the Assyrian language was marginalized by Aramaic, written in the Aramaean alphabet, but Neo-Assyrian cuneiform remained in use in literary tradition well into Parthian times. The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in AD 75.
III. ATTEMPTS AT TRANSLATION
No one guessed the meaning of the wedges when early travelers found cuneiform in some of the ruins that were discovered, especially the ruins of Persepolis, in Iran. Pietro della Valle, an Italian traveler, in 1621 noticed the 413 lines of inscription on the mountain wall at Behistun in western Iran and copied some of the signs. In 1674 Jean Chardin, a French trader, published complete groups of cuneiforms and noted that the inscriptions always appeared in sets of three parallel forms. The first real progress toward reading the writing at Behistun was made by Carsten Niebuhr, a German member of a Danish scientific expedition to the Middle East from 1761 to 1767. He correctly thought the threefold inscription to be transcripts of the same text in three different kinds of unknown writing and in 1777 he published the first accurate and complete copies of the Behistun inscriptions. These great trilingual inscriptions of Darius I, king of Persia, were written in Persian, Elamite (formerly known as Susian), and Babylonian cuneiforms. The three systems of writing were used by the Persian kings of the Achaemenid dynasty to make their decrees known to three subject nations.
The Persian cuneiform was the first of the inscriptions to be deciphered. The German scholars Oluf Gerhard Tychsen and Georg Friedrich Grotefend and the Danish philologist Rasmus Christian Rask each identified several signs. The French Orientalist Eugene Burnouf finally deciphered most of the signs of the Persian cuneiform system, and the British Assyriologist Henry Creswicke Rawlinson independently interpreted the text he had copied afresh from the Behistun rock and published the results in 1846. The task of deciphering the Persian cuneiform was made easier by existing knowledge of Pahlavi, a later Persian language. The Persian is the simplest and the most recent of all the cuneiform systems. It contains 36 characters that are almost entirely alphabetic, although they are used also for certain simple syllables. In addition, the Persian cuneiform system has a word divider. The use of the Persian cuneiform was confined to the period from 550 to 330 BC. The oldest example of this cuneiform is probably an inscription of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae and the most recent that of Artaxerxes III (reigned 358?-338 BC) at Persepolis.
The Elamite cuneiform is frequently called the language of the second form because it appears in the second position of the trilingual inscriptions of the Achaemenian kings. Decipherment of it was first undertaken by the Danish Orientalist Neils Ludvig Westergaard in 1844. The fact that the same text is repeated word for word in each cuneiform of the trilingual inscriptions was of great importance in translation of the Elamite, in which no modern language or hitherto known language gave any help. This system contains 96 syllabic signs, 16 logograms, and 5 determinants. The readings of the Elamite characters are in general fairly clear, although some words are still uncertain. The Babylonian version of the Behistun text was deciphered through the united efforts of the French Orientalist Jules Oppert, the Irish Orientalist Edward Hincks, and the French archaeologist Louis Frédérick Joseph Caignart de Saulcy, and Rawlinson. The similarity of the language written in this third cuneiform system to well-known Semitic dialects was helpful in decipherment. The Behistun records gave the first clue to deciphering it, but it is now known that the Babylonian cuneiform was in use more than 2000 years before the Behistun records were inscribed. Many documents of great antiquity in this cuneiform have been found in Babylon, Nineveh, and other places near the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Babylonian cuneiform was inscribed on seals, cylinders, stone obelisks, statues, and the walls of palaces. It appears on a great many clay tablets, some as large as 22.8 cm by 15.2 cm (9 in by 6 in) and others little more than 2.54 cm sq (little more than 1 in sq). The writing is often very small. Some tablets carry six lines per 2.54 cm and must be read with a magnifying glass.
IV. MODERN KNOWLEDGE OF CUNEIFORM
Definite proof that the cuneiform signs were originally pictographs was lacking until early pictographic inscriptions could be found. The German scholar Friedrich Delitzch in 1897 opposed the view that cuneiform signs were originally pictographs, holding instead that they developed from a comparatively small number of basic signs. Combinations of such basic signs, he held, yielded in the course of time hundreds of cuneiform signs. The theory was received with mixed approval, but most scholars inclined toward the theory of pictorial origin. The principle of pictorial origin was finally established in 1913 by the American Orientalist George Aaron Barton in The Origin and Development of Babylonian Writing, which presented a collection of 288 pictographs, found in early cuneiform inscriptions and traced their development. According to Barton, the original signs were modeled after the human body and its parts and after mammals, birds, insects, fishes, trees, stars and clouds, earth and water, buildings, boats, household furniture and utensils, fire, weapons, clothing, implements of worship, nets, traps, pottery, and musical instruments. Excavations conducted by German archaeologists from 1928 to 1931 at Erech (Uruk), on the site of present-day Al Warkā’, Iraq, yielded the oldest-known examples of pictograph writing on clay tablets.
The translation of cuneiform writing has contributed greatly to present knowledge of early Assyria and Babylonia and the Middle East in general. The cuneiform Code of Hammurabi is one of the most important documents to emerge from pre-Christian antiquity. Other tablets have helped to clarify the history of ancient Egypt. A cuneiform script discovered in 1929 during the French excavations of Ra’s Shamrah in North Syria has proven to be an alphabet of consonants; it was estimated to have been in use from about 1400 to 1200 BC. The mythological texts written in this so-called Ra’s Shamrah cuneiform alphabet have thrown light on the religious life of ancient Syria and have bearing upon the reinterpretation of some aspects of the Bible.
REFERENCES:
* Hans G. Güterbock – Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2007
* Ancient Texts Relating to the Bible – Cuneiform Tablet (WSRP – West Semitic Research Project) * R. Borger, Assyrisch-Babylonische Zeichenliste, 2nd ed., Neukirchen-Vluyn (1981)
* A. Deimel, Liste der archaischen Keilschriftzeichen (WVDOG 40; Berlin 1922)
* F. Ellermeier, M. Studt, Sumerisches Glossary
